Garden | opening reception

April 18 | 6 to 9:00 p.m. | Northlight Gallery

"Garden," and MFA thesis exhibition from Mehrdad Mirzaie, comprises thousands of amateur photographs sourced from digital archives and social media accounts, transferred onto glass. Many of these images are manipulated and stripped of names or any contextual information. They depict individuals who lost their lives, were forcibly disappeared or arrested due to the socio-political conditions in Iran from the Islamic Revolution of February 1979 to the present. This archive/anti-archive includes personal photographs from family albums or moments of everyday life, with the photographers remaining unknown. It is an anti-archive because it lacks the conventional qualities of a functional archive—it cannot serve as a reliable source of information, as it is marked by missing data, gaps and erasures.

Within Iranian culture, the idea of a garden is deeply tied to the concept of a cemetery—a resting place where life and death coexist and where memory is simultaneously preserved and erased. It becomes a metaphor for both life (through its vibrant, cultivated nature) and death (through the resting bodies beneath the soil), reflecting the tension between presence and absence, remembrance and forgetting.

Image credit: Mehrdad Mirzaie.